Tag Archives: Paul Tillich

Sin, Words, and Grace

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“Speak words that give shape to our anguish.”  This poet recognized the power of the spoken word to provide a container to human experience, to impose a limit to what would be otherwise unbearable.  Another poet put it like this, “To name the abyss is to avoid it.” There is a profound difference in the raw, unmediated, emotional, pre-symbolic (pre-verbal) experience of the abyss and the concept of “the abyss.”

Let me share an anecdote from clinical work many years ago.  I had young male for a client who was very addictive and functioned very poorly at times.  He had no history of religion and church.  He stumbled upon the phenomena of “religion and church” and found himself attending a formal, non-evangelical church fairly regularly.  He told me several times of how comforting the liturgy was to him, particularly that portion where he acknowledged, by the spoken word, that he was a sinner.  As we explored this experience of his, he recognized that by conceptualizing that he was a “sinner” he was able to articulate a deep-seated feeling of “badness” and “darkness” and “shame.”  He was able to apply a limit or boundary to the experience.

There are some whose life is sin articulate.  Their life is raw, unmediated, unmitigated “hell on earth.”  And I’m not talking about “sin” as it is usually taught.  I’m talking about sin as the experience of being separated from one’s Source and separated in a radical fashion. It takes a quantum leap for the individual so confined to say, “I am a sinner” and in so doing escape that “hell on earth”,  that world which Paul Tillich described as “an empty world of self-relatedness.”

This is actually a conversion experience and is a quantum leap from one sphere of existence into another.  It involves the experience of discontinuity, what St. Augustine described at his moment of conversion as “that moment when I became other than I was.”  This is not simple compliance with a syllogism

Let me close with the marvelous sonnet of John Donne:

BATTER my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, 5
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie: 10
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

More on spiritual incest

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Continuing the theme of spiritual incest, an old bromide from my youth was, “He who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  This is relevant to groups and certainly to churches and denominations.  A church that overly emphasizes  the “come ye out from among them and be ye separate” theme can find themselves pathologically alone to the extent that they have no relevance to the world at large.  They are suddenly lost in “a world of empty self relatedness.”  (Paul Tillich)  And since mental illness is a reference problem, they technically are mentally ill.  A case in point is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of our present day world.

I would like to offer a quote from an Ibsen play, Peer Gynt, which so eloquently illustrates this “empty self relatedness” that Tillich mentioned.  This is the superintendent of an insane asylum describing the constituents of his facility:

Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself.  He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.

The language is a bit stilted, being centuries old, and it describes individuals.  But the lunacy portrayed here is also relevant to groups who have so isolated themselves, so turned in upon themselves, so violated the law of exchange with the outside world, that they have essentially sold their soul to the devil.

Mary Karr and prayer

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Mary Karr has written three best selling memoirs—-Cherry, The Liars Club, Lit.  She has also written several books of poetry.  Her writings chronicle a very difficult life in a small East Texas town in the 1960’s.  Her parents were conflicted….to say the least…and she soon turned to drugs and alcohol.  Her last memoir, Lit, summarizes again her upbringing as well as her marital woes, difficulties in raising her son, and her continued descent into alcohol and drugs.  Her writing was the only thing that kept her going.  She finally “bottomed out”, as they say, and ended up in a rehab and in a 12-step group.  Recovery was very difficult for her and one of the most difficult parts of it was learning to pray.  Her sponsor told her prayer was a necessary part of the process but, having been raised in a very irreligious, even atheistic, home prayer was difficult.  As she began to pray, she prayed angrily and disrespectfully to God.  But she was honest.  She learned that she had to kneel to pray.  That too was hard.  But slowly she relented and began to pray fervently and today prayer is an essential part of her life.  She became a Catholic  One thing she learned to do, upon instruction, was to “pray the alphabet.”  This meant going down the alphabet and finding some to correspond with each letter to give things to God for.

I now “pray the alphabet” myself.  This has a meditative dimension for me, helping me to focus and helping me to meditate.  Another thing that has helped me immensely is to realize that there is not a corporally-existing deity “out there” who is listening avidly to my prayer, waiting to heed to be beck and call.  I don’t know where the prayers go but I do believe they make a difference.  I just don’t know how and I don’t need to know.  I know that spiritual leaders over the centuries have advocated prayer.  If people like Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart….not to mention the “upper echelon” of teachers such as Jesus…then it is important to pray.  One important dimension is that it offers good energy to others and to our world.  (See Peter Begsa re quantum physics and prayer.)  And, also check out this link for an interview of Mary Karr and her struggles with prayer, the church, and spirituality as a whole:   http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/175809 .